William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulknerwas an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 September 1897
CityNew Albany, MS
thinking giving promise
I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
moving people trying
A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.
want enough
I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
writing men long
I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.
trying can-do
Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.
men poor mankind
Poor man. Poor mankind.
teaching heart sacrifice
He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers
behinds
He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
materials i-can ifs
I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
war purpose fever
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
gold way feels
It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
war self enemy
The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
inspiration voice
Listen to the voices.
poetry facts not-interested
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.